After the fight in the card-room and its supposed tragical outcome, the down-stairs game-room had been hastily closed. As on the night of Plegg’s eavesdropping, the upper room held two occupants, and they were the same two whose voices had reached the first assistant through the partly opened gallery window. And, as before, the lop-shouldered man was the bearer of news.
“By cripes! I guess I know what I’m talking about?” he snarled. “I’ve just come from there. He’s gone, I tell you; lit out—skipped. The watchman swears he don’t know nothin’ about it—didn’t go near the shed after they took him there.”
The master gambler, again with his hands in his pockets, and again tilting gently in the wooden-seated chair, nodded his approval. “I’m glad of it,” he said.
“The hell you are! And him tryin’ to butt in on your game and run you out?”
“That’s what I said”—curtly.
“And you ain’t goin’ to use that dope that you pulled out o’ me at the end of a gun?”
“Not in a thousand years, Simmy. Haven’t you been with me long enough to know that I’m no damn’ worm to crawl up a man’s leg and bite him to death? You say the young duck’s alive and has made his get-away. That’s all right. If he comes at me like a two-fisted man, maybe I’ll send him word that he’d better come heeled. But that’s all.”
“You won’t take the dope and do him up the way I was tellin’ you?”
“Nothing doing.”
“Well, then, by cripes! I know somebody that will take it—and pay good money for it!” shrilled the disappointed one.